Browsing Posts in Baseball

On this, the opening day of Major League Baseball, I am harkened back to the days of my youth. The time when I lived, breathed and bled everything baseball. It wasn’t only the impending start of my own season; it was also the time that the new baseball cards were coming out from a variety of companies. Being the budding entrepreneur that I was, I kept close tabs on all of the star players like McGwire, Canseco and Strawberry, with the hopes of my baseball cards gaining value.

In retrospect, this was a somewhat innocent time, circa 1987-88, long before steroids and PED’s became commonplace jargon. Had these recent revelations of the past few years occurred in my youth, I might have taken it quite personally and have felt an emotional “crushing” to know that my “idols” were somehow cheating the game that I loved. This was the time of the Oakland A’s dominance and I worshiped the so-called “Bash Brothers;” Canseco and McGwire. I had their posters, collected their baseball cards and persuaded my parents to buy me anything related to the A’s and to the Bash Brothers. In essence, I was simply a young and naïve child who bought into the hype machine, desperately seeking heroes who I could someday emulate. continue reading…